Imagine turning a dense textbook chapter into an engaging video overview, a quick audio summary, or a complete slide deck—in just a few clicks.

Meet NotebookLM (now called Gemini Notebook), Google’s free AI tool built for educators.

Teachers have been loving it:

100% Grounded in Your Curriculum: Upload your PDFs, docs, or scanned pages. It only uses the material you provide—no random internet hallucinations.

Endless Resource Creation: Instantly generate slides, infographics, audio overviews, and interactive study guides tailored directly to your class.

🎓 Ready to master it?

We just recently launch our new course: Getting Started with NotebookLM for Teachers.

It has everything you need to go from beginner to pro is waiting inside …

… plus, it’s a GREAT way to get teachers up to speed on this powerful tool.

PS: Group discounts are available! Just hit reply and I can provide you with a quote.

📚 New AI resources this week

1️⃣ AI Embraced by More Students and Educators, New Survey Finds (via K–12 Dive) — A new Instructure survey finds AI use has become mainstream among educators, students, and parents, with adoption accelerating across K–12 schools.

2️⃣ New Framework for AI Literacy in Teacher Education (via arXiv) — Researchers introduce the RAIL-Ed framework, proposing six pillars—including ethical reasoning and empowered agency—to better prepare teachers for generative AI. While academic, it's a thought-provoking look at where AI PD may be headed.

3️⃣ Student Preferences for AI-Generated Instructional Videos (via arXiv) — New research finds students generally rate AI-created instructional videos highly but still prefer human instructors for complex learning, reinforcing the importance of blending AI with teacher expertise.

What’s a topic you’d like to see covered here? Hit REPLY to this email and let me know.

Have you done anything you’d like to share with the AI for Admins community? Hit REPLY and let me know.

Would you like to write a guest post to support and equip AI for Admins readers? Hit REPLY and let me know.

🗳 Poll: Back to school AI emphasis

Instructions:

💡 5 Ideas from an ISTELive Panel That Every School Leader Should Steal

So much of the school leader dialogue around AI sounds alike these days.

When I started hearing advice stolen from Disneyland — and phrases like “solutions in search of problems” — I knew I was in the right place.

This summer at the ISTELive 2026 conference, I moderated a panel (sponsored by Brisk Teaching) with three educators who are neck-deep in AI decisions every single day:

I pulled these panelists together very intentionally. I knew all three had real-world experience from schools and districts. Plus, over time, I’ve come to value their unique perspectives.

We didn't set out to solve AI in education in 30 minutes. But we did talk about a handful of ideas that are still ringing in my ears weeks later.

Stevie Frank opened with an idea borrowed from her district's CTO: when Disneyland was designed, they didn't pour concrete sidewalks first and tell people where to walk. They let people walk the grass first, watched where the paths naturally formed, and then paved those paths.

That's her district's approach to AI guidance. Instead of starting with a policy document, they started with conversations — a staff book study, informal chats, coaching cycles — and let common language and guardrails emerge from what teachers were actually doing and asking. The guidelines came second. The people came first.

If your district started with a 12-page AI policy nobody read, this is your permission to back up and build the sidewalk where the grass is already worn down.

Dr. Kip Glazer's line stopped the room: so many ed-tech rollouts fail not because the tool was bad, but because nobody asked what problem it was solving in the first place. Her constant question to staff — "What problem are you actually trying to solve?" — comes before any conversation about tools, strategies, or budget.

It's an easy trap to fall into, especially at a conference like ISTE, walking a vendor hall full of shiny, well-marketed answers to questions nobody asked. The fix isn't complicated, just disciplined: name the problem first, then go looking for what might solve it.

Instead of a binary "AI allowed / AI not allowed" policy, Stevie Frank's district uses a spectrum: from no AI at all, to AI as a thought partner, to AI doing more of the heavy lifting — decided assignment by assignment, not school-wide. Some of her teachers now put that continuum up on the board and have students weigh in on where a given assignment should fall.

It reframes the AI conversation from a rule to be enforced into a judgment call to be taught — which, when you think about it, is a far more useful skill for students to walk away with anyway.

This might be the idea I keep coming back to. Dr. Glazer described watching teachers get upset about students cheating with AI, and instead of jumping straight to policy, she names what's actually happening underneath it: a loss of identity. For years, the teacher was the most knowledgeable person in the room. AI (like the internet before it) quietly took that away, and there's a grieving process that comes with it.

Her move as a leader is to acknowledge that feeling before trying to redirect it — "I understand it's frustrating, and you have this sense that you have to be the most knowledgeable person in here." Only after that gets named does the conversation move productively toward redesigning assessments around process instead of product.

Worth remembering next time a teacher's frustration about AI shows up looking like resistance to change.

One exchange stuck with me. Stephanie Jacobs described a district tool-vetting process where teachers can push back on decisions — and where a "no" always comes with an explanation, not just a denial. I pointed out in the moment that when leaders tell teachers to "get on board" with a new tool, it can come across as manipulative, because it frames a teacher's concern as a compliance problem instead of what it usually is: advocacy for their students.

A teacher saying "this isn't working for my kids" isn't the opposition. That's the job.

There was a lot more in this conversation than I could fit into five ideas — including a great back-and-forth on academic integrity and how grading culture itself might be part of the cheating problem. If any of this resonated, it's worth watching the full 20-minute panel.